Alero Akporiaye

on sabbatical academic year 2025–26

Alero Akporiaye is an associate professor of Political Economy in RISD’s History, Philosophy and the Social Sciences department. She is also a research affiliate at the Institute of African and Diaspora Studies at the University of Lagos, Nigeria and an editor at the Ground Works journal. Akporiaye is an international political economist who teaches courses broadly in international relations and has published research on political risk, oil politics and corporate social responsibility. She has research interests in the political economy of oil extraction, ethnography of sites of oil extraction, corporate social responsibility and the extractive sector, corporate social responsibility and human rights, political risk and multinational corporations, experimental methods in international political economy, African political economy, African and diasporic African feminist theories in international political economy, and African and diasporic African knowledge production systems.

Akporiaye is currently working on a book project that is an African feminist political economy investigation of oil conflict in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The book argues that prevailing neoliberal explanations of oil conflict in international political economy are incomplete because they are ahistorical. These explanations ignore the role of colonialism and imperialism in shaping colonial and post-colonial political and economic constructions of the local polities of oil-producing communities. Ultimately, she argues that colonial histories and imperialism are vital factors to consider in understanding conflict at sites of resource extraction.

She is from Warri in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria and is an avid supporter of Arsenal Football Club and Nigeria’s national female and male football teams.